The Game (14 page)
It was a decade in which good young prospects had been exchanged for better veterans; four Stanley Cups were won, but left was an unpromising mix of deteriorating age and mediocre youth to carry on.
Several disastrous seasons followed; then unexpectedly things changed again. In the early 1970s, a combination of good fortune (the signing of free-agent Swedish defenseman Borje Salming), good draft picks (Lanny McDonald and Ian Turnbull in 1973; goalie Mike Palmateer and Dave “Tiger” Williams in 1974), and the gradual maturity of Darryl Sittler into the team’s new leader, transformed the Leafs into an immensely promising team. Indeed, by mid decade, led by this talented core of players (by performance and promise, arguably as good as any six players on any team in the league, including the Canadiens), the Leafs became a genuine Stanley Cup contender, not quite ready to win, but good enough that in each year they seemed set for a final breakthrough. Their star players in place, all they would need was a stronger supporting cast, something they could reasonably expect to build through the draft by one or two players a year.
But it hasn’t happened. A series of ill-conceived drafts and poor trades has left the supporting cast no stronger now than it was four years ago; and the Leafs are slowly dying. I can see it in Sittler, Salming, and McDonald. At their playing peaks, having given as much to their team as they can give, they now look tired and frustrated, as if suddenly they understand that nothing they can give any longer will be enough.
I can see it in Tiger Williams. For four years, he ran around the ice, high-sticking, charging, fighting on hair-trigger impulse, always excitingly involved. He distracted fans and teammates into greater passion, distracted opponents away from their style of play to his, then scored timely, infuriating goals, always celebrating them in his outrageous, mocking way. But now his joyful fire seems calculated and forced. As if sensing the fall around him, he tries harder, running around the ice in a desperate binge of effort, but with much less effect.
He is now out of step with the game; his penalties and fights come annoyingly at the wrong time; he looks only a parody of himself. It is just Tiger Williams and his “routine.”
Most of all, I can see it in Turnbull and Palmateer. They are two immensely gifted but undisciplined players who need the temper of competition to distract them out of their wallowing self preoccupation.
Both have been pampered too long for their superstar skills; both have seen how good they can be, mistaking it for how good they are; both can play brilliantly, as each did last year in the Leafs’ playoff upset of the Islanders. But now, as the team settles easily onto a competitive plateau that will lead nowhere until it leads down, they find time for the kind of petty self indulgence that makes them frustratingly ordinary.
On paper, the Leafs would seem a superior team to their predecessors a few years ago, but they are not. The energy and excitement they felt at being good and promising, so important to their success, have worn away and nothing has been put in their place. They are a beaten team. They have already lost Turnbull and Palmateer; they are quickly losing Sittler, Salming, McDonald, and Williams. As players, they have been in the hands of their owner, and in the hands of the owner’s general manager, his scouts and coaches. Depending on them to draft the right players, to make the right trades, to give them a chance to do what they were good enough to do, they have been badly let down.
The tragedy is that what they had has been squandered and is now gone, with so little to show for it.
There is a different crowd in the Gardens for a Canadiens game, a season-ticket-holder crowd. While for games against other teams tickets get spread among family, friends, and business clients, for the Canadiens they are kept and used by the subscribers themselves. It means seeing more adults and fewer children, more sports jackets, suits, and ties in the crowd. While it seems almost incredible now, until Conn Smythe left the Gardens in 1964, a jacket and tie was considered compulsory attire for season-ticket holders of red (now gold) seats. In letters to subscribers, Smythe would sometimes remind them of this rule, warning that repeated violations of it could lead to non-renewal of their season-tickets. Tonight, and each time we play here, it’s as if that rule was back in force.
The Leafs start quickly, moving the puck into our zone and keeping it there for most of the first few minutes. But it’s only the knee-jerk commitment of a home team, without much depth or resolve, and as we stiffen and push back, the game turns and moves to the center zone. Play is sloppy, possession changing with every pass, but scoring chances given away are quickly given back on offsides and more bad passes, and the game remains scoreless. Near the middle of the period, Napier swings wide of Turnbull, who hooks him down for a penalty. With the extra man, we find the composure and coordination we were missing, but Palmateer is spectacular, stopping Lafleur and Robinson in succession, then Shutt on a rebound, and we don’t score.
Moments later, with Turnbull caught deep in our zone, Salming swoops back and steals the puck from Lambert as he moves to the net with Tremblay. Then, lying in the corner, the puck safely at center, with a petty gamesmanship unworthy of his great skill, Salming reaches up with his stick and trips Lambert, getting a penalty. A few seconds later, Lapointe scores and we go ahead, 1-0.
The Leafs tie the game quickly, Boutette scoring after a penalty to Houle, but when the game resumes, the sloppy play continues.
Already the fans, even some of the players, can sense that the real game is being played the one minute in every three that Jarvis, Gainey, and Chartraw play against Sittler, McDonald, and Williams. Because the Leafs depend on Sittler’s line for a high percentage of their scoring, our approach is simple—stop Sittler, McDonald, and Williams and we will win. To do that, Bowman wants the Jarvis line, our best defensive line, to play them head-to-head. At home, with the advantage of the last change of players, Leafs coach Roger Neilson works to keep Sittler away from Jarvis, but finding he can do it only by moving him on and off the ice too quickly to be effective, he soon abandons the effort. Thereafter, whenever Sittler’s line goes onto the ice, Jarvis’s line follows. Within that match-up there is another, which for me has always been the best part of a Leafs-Canadiens game. It is when Lanny McDonald and Bob Gainey play against each other. They are two strong, proud, willful players, Gainey on left wing, McDonald on right, face to face, as if theirs is a personal test—skating, hammering at each other with shoulders and hips, hard and often in painful exhilaration, like two well-matched fighters taking their best shots, grim, respectful, and inside, grinning with enormous pleasure. As I watch them on the ice, uncomplaining, never acknowledging the other, friends competing as good friends often do, it is as if they understand what we can only sense—that whoever wins their private contest will win the game.
It is a great temptation to say too much about Bob Gainey. It comes in part from a fear, guilt-edged in all of us, that Gainey, a fifteen-goal scorer in a league full of do-nothing thirty-goal scorers, goes too often unrewarded. But mostly it is admiration. If there is such a thing as a“(p)layer’s player,” it would be Gainey. A phrase often heard and rarely explained, it is seldom applied to the best player of a sport, as Gainey is not, for performance is only a part of it. Instead, the phrase is for someone who has the personal and playing qualities that others wish they had, basic, unalterable qualities—dependability, discipline, hard work, courage—the roots of every team. To them, Gainey adds a timely, insistent passion, an enormous will to win, and a powerful, punishing playing style, secure and manly, without the strut of machis-mo. If I could be a forward, I would want to be Bob Gainey.
I first saw him play on TV. It was the fall of 1973, a few months after I had left the Canadiens to article in Toronto, and I was in Fredericton, New Brunswick, for a sports banquet. When the banquet ended, still early in the evening, the guests and many of those who attended reconvened in a large room where there was a TV turned on to a Canadiens game. The noise from scores of conversations was loud enough that no one could hear the game, but watching whenever I could, I kept seeing an image I didn’t recognize. All I could tell was that whoever it was, he could really skate. Later that year, after I decided that Gainey would become a big star for the Canadiens, I found out he couldn’t score.
It took more than two years for Montreal’s press, fans, coaches, and management to agree that Gainey had an indefinite future with the team doing simply what he had been doing. I remember a brief talk I had with Bowman on the way to an airport after a game in Gainey’s second year. Gainey had just played what I thought was an outstanding game, characteristically without a goal or an assist, and I was talking extravagantly to Bowman about him. Bowman was agreeing, but once or twice, wincing, fighting his own feelings, he said that Gainey really needed to score more often, that a regular forward on the Canadiens team had to score at least twenty goals. The next year, after he had scored several times early in the season, when others were predicting forty goals or more for him, Gainey talked of twenty-five, not with any longing, but simply as a total that would remove the pressure from him, that would release him to play the game he knew he played best. Soon after, when the team was in the midst of a slump, he began to think differently. He said he had come to realize that if he was to do his job well, he couldn’t score even twenty-five goals a season. He felt that if he did, the negative trade-off in goals against would make it a poor bargain for the team. He scored fifteen goals that year.
The same year, Doug Jarvis joined the team, and with Gainey and a thirty-five-year-old defenseman—right winger named Jim Roberts, they formed the “Jarvis line.” Playing one minute in every three, on a team that scored more than three hundred and eighty goals, they scored thirty-three. But playing the first shift of every game, often the last shift of a period and the last minute of every game when the score was close, playing the Clarke, Sittler, Perreault, Dionne, Esposito, and Trottier lines, the league’s best lines, head-to-head, they allowed even fewer. It seemed inconceivable to us. After losing just twelve games (eleven regular-season games, and one playoff game) and winning the Stanley Cup, there was a clear and unequivocal consensus by the end of the 1976 season—there was room for a low-scoring but peerless defensive forward, for a low-scoring but superb defensive line.
That is an important moment for a defensive player, particularly a forward—to know that his play will be judged against a standard suited to his natural game; to know that a general manager will ignore statistics, or emphasize different ones, and reward him for what he does for the team, not for what he doesn’t do. If he scores only rarely, as he always has, it is important to know that the press and the fans won’t wonder out loud why he is playing. To feel the pressure taken off, to feel accepted and appreciated for what he does, no longer feeling himself at a halfway house, safe for now, but getting older, and knowing he must soon be something else that is decisive. For without that consensus, the incentives—more applause, more kind words, more money—are too much, tempting him away from what he can do to what he cannot, at great cost to the team, and to him.
It doesn’t mean, it will never mean, that as a defensive forward he stops craving the glory and excitement of scoring goals. It is only in the last few years that Gainey has not gone home in the summer intent on returning to Montreal a more complete player, practicing several times a week, working on his shooting and puck handling, using the summer as a breathing space, as time to deprogram himself from his defensive rut, to redirect his mind to new and broader roles to play. In the 1976 Canada Cup, with linemates who played a quicker, less defensive style, Gainey discovered he could successfully play a more offensive role. When the tournament ended, he returned to our training camp and recalls now that he scored nine goals in nine exhibition games (it was actually four—to a defensive player it only
seemed
like nine). When the season began, however, old habits, old instincts, returned, and gradually he scored less and less, ending the year with fourteen goals.
In part, it is because he lacks a goal scorer’s skills. He is a power player, a strong, tireless skater with great straight-ahead speed, coming as he does from behind the play into the open at center for a pass, then around a back-pedalling defenseman for a low, hard, sharp-angled shot. But he is without the quickness and deft maneuverability in his skates and hands that puts the offensive player into scoring position, and without the delicate goal scorer’s touch that does the rest.
But as well as his lack of offensive skills, it is the role he plays on the team that holds him back, a role best suited to his skills and to the needs of the team; a role where scoring has little priority; a role he will not compromise. So, while he always feels he can score more often, by now he also knows that he won’t. Like the thirty-handicap golfer who shoots forty on the front nine, somehow he knows that his final score will still be one hundred.
He is the consummate team player. An often misunderstood phrase, it does not mean that Gainey is without the selfish interests the rest of us have. It means instead that without the team’s tangible rewards, without the wins and the Stanley Cups, there are few tangible rewards for him. For Gainey’s skills are a team’s skills, ones that work best and show best when a team does well; ones that seem less important when it doesn’t. While other players, in their roles, constantly battle the tension between team and self (it is surely good for Larry Robinson to score a goal; if the team is ahead and the score is close, it may not be good for the team that he try), simply put, what’s good for Bob Gainey is good for the team; and vice versa. In many ways he is like former basketball star Bill Bradley. Without virtuoso individual skills, team play becomes both virtue and necessity, and what others understand as unselfishness is really cold-eyed realism—(h)e simply knows what works best, for the team and for him.